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Saturday, August 1, 2015

Fuzzing is a mechanism to exercise software with random inputs. Fuzz testing is an integral component of API verification and it helps to uncover potential failures due to incorrect input handling.
While you can find more information about fuzz testing from various web references, this post intends to summarize some key principles/best practices associated with fuzzing.

Fuzz test planning

Your AUT (Application Under Test) may consists of hundreds of APIs. However, it will not make sense to exercise all APIs with fuzz testing. For example, I usually take the APIs which are directly called by consumer applications for fuzz testing. Similarly, study your APIs and choose the APIs which are highly sensitive for user interactions.

Execute Fuzz testing

Once you identify the APIs that are important to be fuzzed, figure out an approach to execute fuzz testing. Manual fuzzing should be out of scope. You should plan for an automated fuzzing mechanism.

You may try fuzzing APIs with web services testing tool such as soapUI. soapUI NG Pro provides you with fuzz testing facility as part of its security testing component.

You will also consider building a custom fuzz testing framework instead of using a separate tool. A custom framework can analyze API model ( or WADL in a REST service or WSDL in case of SOAP based services) and generate random inputs. Building such a framework will not be a complex effort and you should be able to plug it as part of continuous integration system. So that, fuzzing will be done seamless manner without any human interaction. Due to the flexibility and ease of maintenance, I prefer the second approach of having a custom in-house fuzzing framework.

Analyze Results

Regardless of the tool/framework used for fuzz testing, it will be important to analyze the results either automated or manual approach. You will automatically assert Expected Exceptions using the in-built facilities provided by testing frameworks.

Web Services Testing with soapUI

About Charitha

Charitha Kankanamge possesses over 14 years of experience in various technological domains including software testing/QA and middleware technical support. Currently, he works as a Software Quality Assurance Manager at Amazon. Previously, he worked for an open source software company, WSO2 as Senior Manager, Technical Support. He is also a committer of the Apache Software Foundation. Charitha's strengths and key experiences include functional testing, SOA testing, test planning and agile/exploratory test mechanisms.